Google Summer of Code

In 2009, I got the opportunity to take part in Google’s Summer of Code:

Google Summer of Code is a global program that offers student developers stipends to write code for various open source software projects.

Description of my project, mentored by Kate Keahey (leading the Nimbus project at The Globus Alliance), as of April 2009:

Distribution of computing jobs among different clouds (Nimbus, AWS)

The aim of this project is a scheduler for scientific computing jobs that uses resources from local, scientific and commercial computing clouds dynamically. It should be an extension to current well-established job submission systems and as transparent to users as possible.

Within my “Amazon Web Services for ATLAS Computing” (AWSAC) project, until now, a proof-of-principle job system has been developed for ATLAS Computing (ATLAS is one of six experiments at LHC, CERN (Geneva)) using Amazon’s cloud. This system is formed by the AWSAC tools. Their infrastructure will be the starting point for the current project. The first mile stone is to make the system compatible to Nimbus — which will require a large redesign — and to define and provide clear interfaces.

Furthermore, the implementation of the scheduler as backend of the GANGA tool is the goal. GANGA delivers a standardized job description language and is in active use by many ATLAS and LHCb (another experiment at LHC) users to submit their computing jobs.

Finally, this new infrastructure has to be evaluated and optimized regarding cost-effectiveness, maximum performance and other properties.

Related information:

Blog posts regarding this project can be found in the GSoC category.